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If you are a political leader and are afraid of Facebook and Youtube, then you are afraid of your own people. In the case of Erdogan, he is just another Muslim Brotherhood goon trying to tighten the screws on society to slowly squeeze Turkey into becoming an Islamic Republic. His first move to achieve this was jailing thousands of officers in the Turkish military, who were schooled in the thoughts of Kemal Atatürk, the "Father of the Turks".

As a brief description of what Kemal Atatürk was all about, I'll just lift this from Wikipedia:

His military campaigns led to victory in the Turkish War of Independence. Atatürk then embarked upon a program of political, economic, and cultural reforms, seeking to transform the former Ottoman Empire into a modern, secular, and democratic nation-state. Under his leadership, thousands of new schools were built, primary education was made free and compulsory, and women were given equal civil and political rights, while the burden of taxation on peasants was reduced.[3] The principles of Atatürk's reforms, upon which modern Turkey was established, are referred to as Kemalism.

Not bad, considering that this was in the late 1920's! He even introduced a new Latin based alphabet, that replaced the old Arabic script! Can you image a political leader today, who would have the balls and the support to just say, "Oh, let's just switch our alphabet."

The strategy of Muslim Brotherhood cretins, is to get elected claiming to be "moderately Islamic", without showing their true intentions. Then they use the courts to jail any political opposition and then slowly implement restrictions on society to transform it into an Islamic state. With the army now out of his way, there are only a few brave folks left who stage protests. When his corruption was exposed, he thought that he was far enough down the Islamic path that he can just act like a caliph now.

It would really be a sad loss for humanity, if all those enlightened thoughts of Atatürk get stomped into the ground, and Turkey is forced into the shackles of Islam in their place.

A good deal of blame for the re-islamization of Turkey falls on Europe. It was they who insisted that the army loosens its grip on power, forgetting that in Turkey, the army plays a very different role than it otherwise does. Whereas in Eastern Europe, the traditional role of the army was to suppress anti-Communist thought, in Turkey, the army had a role of enforcing Kemalism and seeing to it that Islam, which was a part of the reason for the downfall of the Ottoman empire, didn't make a comeback into Tur

I'm afraid you've drunk the AtatÃ¼rk kool-aid. It wasn't pretty. There was no equality in the Turkish republic (look at the Kurds, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and yes, even the women). It wasn't a democracy. And changing the alphabet just meant that future generations were condemned to a life without any concept of their history, the good or the bad. The republic was founded on the principle of deportations, massacres and forced assimilation.

It would really be a sad loss for humanity, if all those enlightened thoughts of AtatÃ¼rk get stomped into the ground, and Turkey is forced into the shackles of Islam in their place.

By "Ha ha ha" do you mean "If your nation can be destroyed by YouTube and Facebook, your nation is fairly described as pathetic?" Because if so, I agree completely.

It is not the technology of streaming video and pictures on the internet that they fear so much as what they bear: Ideas. Ideas are the pebble that begin the avalanche of action. The has brought change to many nations, including some that no longer exist, for good or ill.

I don't think it's much to do with narcissism. Since AC posts at 0, you're limiting your audience severely by posting as AC. Even a good comment won't be seen by most (since the default threshold for non-signed-in users is +1 and most registered users probably browse at +1 or +2...)

Is it narcissistic to actually want your post to be seen? I mean, why even comment if no one will see it and/or respond?

I love youtube, so that part makes me sad. But Facebook needs to be banned everywhere, period. There was a time when America's Titans of Industry were people like John D Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie - people who changed the world with things that sheltered us, improved transportation, and fed and powered the nation. Now our magnates are people who help us post selfies and sell its users as a statistic in advertising. Pathetic.

YouTube streaming quality is terrible, and has created a world where no one thinks they need to host their own media servers ever.
Facebook reduces all conversation to banality and creates dangerous delusions in its users.
If only these were the reasons the Turks banned these sites.

I'm not a fan of Facebook by any stretch of the imagination. (I still refuse to open an account despite many people I know being on there.) However, if your entire nation can be "destroyed" by Facebook, then perhaps your nation isn't as stable as you think it is and maybe there are deeper issues than people sharing selfies so their friends can "like" them.